Exploded View

by Sam McPheeters

  Floating, she followed him diagonally southwest, over to the gleaming black Mercedes captured in mid-motion. “See the son?”

  She maneuvered herself around the car and stared into the starboard window. A mousy older gentleman sat in the seat closest to her. Next to him, a young man with Down’s Syndrome slumped with his tongue slightly protruding. The only developmentally disabled people she’d ever interacted with had been children; she found Downsy adults somehow unnerving.

  “Check out the ownership box,” Zack said.

  She pulled this up, reading “OVERHOLSER, RICHARD JR.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The guy next to you is Richard Overholser, senior.”

  “So the car is registered to the son?”

  “Yep.” Zack walked over and leaned across the windshield. “Asshole probably thought no one would ever notice.”

  “Right.” She floated back to the center divider, staring out at the world and its dearth of clues. Zack was on the verge of an exhausted rant about the rich guy and his disabled son, she could feel it, like they were an old married couple with de facto ESP.

  Instead, he turned to her suddenly, saying, “So, what if Pearly got bumped off, and we got to come down here and rub it in his Dupe’s face?”

  “Go get some lunch, Zack.”

  In the morning, she ran. Terri only wanted to jog when she wasn’t able to. But the moment she did set out, there was always a relief tempered with gratitude that she’d made the right choice. She ran down Marengo, away from her building, hair secured by a Hidden Drive brand sweatband, a stats box in her upper-left field of vision showing each step, each calorie burned, each muscle group used, offering endless options for other joggers to run with or against, the motivational possibilities infinite.

  At forty-three, she was fit from running, her old back injuries now nothing more than a passing stiffness. But her age was beginning to show, in the stubborn slack below her jaw, the slight folds below each eye. Her flat stomach wanted to sprout a little belly, one she wasn’t sure she could run off forever. Worst of all was the sun damage. She and Gabriella had been religious about the beach, Terri because she’d grown up in a state where coastlines were either ruled by goombahs or covered in snow, Gabby because she had a spectacular figure and liked to show off. They both had been avid sunbathers, and now her arms had taken on a deep olive hue, and her upper chest was spackled in large, ominous freckles; from certain angles, her skin reminded her of dried apricot. Terri looked older than she was, although it was a well-maintained older.

  The endorphins usually kicked in before Boyle Heights. By the time Terri approached East Cesar Chavez, life felt good. She made a right onto this main commercial thoroughfare, passing faded murals, dogs tied to fresh, skinny trees, minibikes chained around larger trees whose fat roots pushed the pavement up from below, so that she had to make little jumps over the skewed slabs of concrete.

  Then she was jogging down crowded sidewalks, through awninged sections of trendy restaurants that had been allowed to metastasize outside their buildings, running past annoyed diners who failed to recognize that they were the interlopers, not her. Past this were the street vendors selling potted herbs, ghost pepper, tarragon, other kiosks offering henna body art or hand-designed purses. She was in Posertown.

  When she’d moved to Los Angeles, this neighborhood still held the remnants of its former character: pawn shops, liquor stores, hair salons, check cashers. Now it was full of ridiculous arts and crafts boutiques, pottery and woodworking seminars, and hand-tooled shingles for useful trades championed by dilettantes. Above all else, it was a subculture obsessed with furniture. Posers gushed over their sofas and end tables, the “culture” of craftsmanship, which lathing and wood-planing classes they’d attended.

  She jogged past business after business peddling time wasters to a generation that loved wasting time. In front of King Taco, the former neighborhood’s lone holdout, a street vendor sold decals of comical faces to cover electrical outlets. Two doors down, there was the flavored popcorn store with a front door that changed color based on clientele. Next to that, a store sold nothing but binaural headphones shaped like deer antlers. She could understand twenty-somethings living lives of deliberate folly. But the thirty-something posers mystified her. These people had known childhoods of deprivation. How had they so efficiently adapted to the foppery of people who had grown up without hardship?

  Posers posed with the trappings of the past. These days it was all modern vaquero style, white cowboy hats and neckerchiefs worn over bolo ties. At least that was better than five years ago, with flabby white boys shaving their heads and wearing wifebeaters with red or blue doo-rags. Vaquero style must be a reaction to those earlier posers. At least that was a little perk of working Central Division, not having to deal with all the skyscraper knuckleheads, real-life gangsters, coming into Boyle Heights to prey on stray posers after hours.

  Tony Collazo called, a small picture box of his head opening in the upper-right corner of her view.

  “Ayyyyyy. Woman of the hour!”

  “It’s my day off, Tony,” she lied.

  “Yeah? Ours too, now.” He sounded jovial and slurry. “I’m just calling to thank you for getting us off dogshit detail.”

  “Huh?”

  “That nobody you drew? Turns out he’s the shooter on our nobody. You just solved us an assload of hassle.”

  She came to a halt, standing low with her hands on her knees. “Farrukh?”

  “Yeah, whatever the fuck the name is, he’s the guy that popped our boy Froggy Sarin on the Glendale bridge. We got a pic of his leg scribble from a street sweeper on scene. And that is that, and now we are drunk.”

  She remembered the tattoo, just below the knob of Farrukh’s right ankle, something amateurish in Sanskrit she hadn’t deemed worthy of translation.

  “How do you know it’s not a common tattoo?”

  “Hey, because we crossmatched it with three freckles from your crime scene footage, okay? Jesus, you should be happy too, especially considering the news. One more reprobate safely expunged from the realms of malfeasance.”

  “Glad I could help?”

  He hung up, cackling.

  She stood and checked her pulse, trying to recalculate the case with Farrukh as a murderer. She didn’t look forward to telling Zack. It was the first catch of the decade, and she’d already gotten it wrong.

  “Especially considering the news.” In the lower margin, she enabled her news crawl, reading “DAUGHTER OF LA DISTRICT ATTORNEY SANTOS KILLED IN POSSIBLE SEX CRIME.” She shook her head, murmuring, “This ghetto garbage dump of a city,” as she started running back toward her apartment.

  After showering and dressing at home, she put on her shades and saw Zack had texted,

  Got a lead. Car your way in 5

  She peeked out the front window, seeing the car already there, calling Zack back in audio only while hunting for her jacket in the debris field on her bedroom floor. He picked up as she was out the door.

  “Okay, where are you?”

  “I’m just leaving my place.”

  “You haven’t left yet? I’ve got something to show you.”

  “Let me stop walking first,” she said, already seeing a display box in her right-hand field of vision, an expectant screen accompanying her down the stairs and out into the waiting car.

  “Where am I going?” she asked as the car accelerated.

  “Fourth & Olive. So, I went back to twenty minutes before the Swap Meet thing and just walked around the crowd for a while to see if anything looked off. Check this out.”

  He’d culled footage from the basement into a 2D viewing box, so that she was looking at a scene of a teenage refugee boy bopping down the street. He was fit, with bare, wiry arms and ridiculous permed-out hair, and it was early enough that his EyePhones weren’t darkened, so that his nut-brown irises were visible, making him seem even younger and more innocent than he probably was. Although the fact that he o
wned EyePhones at all marked him as a hustler of one sort or another.

  Suddenly the kid looked off in the distance, got spooked, and bolted. Zack had paused and rotated the scene here, drawing a dotted line from the kid’s eyes to one of the between-car blinds.

  “This guy saw our shooter. And he knew our shooter.”

  The footage swung back to the kid’s face, over which she read GOSWAMI, SANJIV.

  “I took the liberty of hunting for a face request, and the kid hasn’t popped up since. But in Known Pals …”

  Three high-relationship names scrolled down. One popped out immediately: Ravi “Bottlecap” Rajagopalan. She didn’t know him, but nicknames were always good news when seeking a weak link in a chain. Sure enough, his Relationships box listed the sixteen-year-old as an associate with the 2K SSKs, a couple of outstanding warrants still tagged.

  “‘Bottlecap,’” Zack said with a slight laugh. “He’s down outside the Two Cal plaza right now, milling around in a gaggle of jerk offs. I got a couple eyes circling overhead and some housing contacts in the vicinity, so I think we should be good if he tries to take it back indoors. We squeeze this kid, he gives up Sanjiv, Sanjiv gives us the shooter, boom.”

  “Hey, yeah, about that. I got word from Tony C. Our boy Farrukh shot and killed, presumably killed, an SSK last week. So, you know, uh, the plot thickens.”

  “Oops.” She could hear him grin in validation.

  “I guess I eat it on that call.”

  “I’m not surprised. Your notes said the guy had EyePhones, and I more or less took that as pre-confirmation that he was indeed a flaming asshole.”

  She’d seen these shades in random shots pulled from his half-month routeline, Farrukh ditching his actual, non-disposable EyePhones just three days before the shooting, on New Year’s Eve, as if he were turning over a new leaf. She’d assumed that this marked Farrukh as a different sort of hustler, a hustler of labor. Even if he made only a hundred dollars a day, he could have still scrimped and saved, maybe found a Swap Meet dealer who did layaway. She’d heard of crazier things.

  “He’s an asshole just because he had shades?”

  “He’s an asshole because he killed another asshole. That’s the Law of Assholes.”

  She didn’t care for his tone of victory. “That’s not an ironclad law.”

  “How does one of these nobodies afford shades without gang connects?”

  “He worked as a delivery guy.”

  “I’m confused. Our boy’s a stone-cold killer. You just told me that. If you’re still defending him, what exactly do you think happened?”

  “I’m not defending him,” she said, feeling defensive herself. “I just want the facts kept straight.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “That if … that just because the guy had shades and at one point a gun doesn’t mean he was gang. Maybe he killed in self-defense …”

  “What?” Zack sounded genuinely incredulous.

  “Maybe this guy he shot, Froggy, was blackmailing him, or threatening a family member.” Her face went hot from the absurdity of her argument.

  “And where do you think he got the gun if not from a gang?”

  Terri looked down at her ragged cuticles, paused, then said, “Maybe he made the gun himself. Any meatball can walk into any Office Plus, plunk down $500 for a three-way printer and a tub of Flexum. All he’d need is bullets.”

  “And five hundred bucks. Which you’re saying he would have already spent on a pair of EyePhones.”

  “Well …”

  “And where’s he going to put a three-way? No gang is gonna let him print up his own arsenal.”

  “Then maybe he bought the gun from a banger.”

  “Really. So far the only gangbanger you have him crossed with is this Froggy fellow he shot. You think Froggy gave him the gun?”

  The car zipped through the South Olive tunnel, popping the side door as it emerged into sunlight and pulled to the curb.

  “I think there are a lot of ways to go on this,” she said, stepping onto the narrow, crowded sidewalk, “so just keep an open mind.”

  “Let the record state that you are telling me to keep an open mind.”

  “Yeah, let the record do that.” She looked straight up at Two California Plaza, one of the few downtown skyscrapers still referred to by name, its mirrored skin a dull matte from years of unwashed grime. The building’s fifty-plus stories always made her nervous this close.

  “I’m at the corner,” she said.

  “Yeah. I see you. Which housing guys are down here now?”

  “How the hell should I know?” Zack stood at the foot of a steep staircase teeming with refugees, no one adhering to one side for up or down. Past him, in the opposite direction, she could see the AT&T building that served as a movie screen, its long-removed corporate markings still visible as faint stains.

  “I mean, which housing guys are you dealing with on this thing?”

  “Oh, uh. Mutty and whatsisface. Hawley.”

  “Alright.” Hawley was probably up for sprints, if it came down to it. “You have a fix on this guy?” She was standing in front of him now.

  “Heart of darkness.” He pointed across the street, to the overgrown knoll. They strode over to the park, traffic routing around them. John Hawley, limber and bald, emerged from the shade. Behind him, she could make out the dark figures of a half-dozen young men sitting cross-legged, arms behind backs.

  “He’s still here,” Hawley said.

  “Good, good. No pointing, so nobody gets the scent, but, down there?” Zack nudged toward the sloped clearing beyond the thicket.

  “He’s just hanging out with his buddies, smoking joints, picking up girls. He’s not going anywhere. Hey,” he nodded toward Terri.

  “Where’d Mutty get to?”

  “We originally came over to pick up some shithead on an attempted murder thing, and then I ran across the boner patrol over here doing hobo fights with rocks. So Mutty’s back there with the main guy, waiting on a warrant revision. Back in the thicket,” he said, laughing as if he’d made a joke.

  She crossed behind them, over to the group of miserable miscreants seated in the shade. The arrest was Zack’s thing, so she’d wait for his pacing, follow his lead. Plus, it was good to act nonchalant. If cops barged in to nab him, he’d have enough warning to bolt. They’d need the cover of Mutty to get close. It was classic cat and mouse bullshit, but she wasn’t going to be the one to spoil the play for her partner.

  As she approached the group of arrestees, Terri frowned at that familiar refugee stink. They smelled like sweat and hot dogs, with a sickly sweet scent of infant: many refugees used baby powder in lieu of showering. Two young uniformed officers stood guard over the bunch. Seeing the face she made, one said, “Stay away from the end.”

  She followed his stare to the furthest member in the group. He was a dirt man, so thoroughly drenched in filth that he’d been rendered ethnically unrecognizable. All he needed were cartoon stinklines, which, she vaguely remembered, was an app somewhere in PanOpt’s sandbox. The man was crying, rocking on the ground, holding his head between two soot-blackened paws.

  “How come he’s not cuffed?”

  “That guy? He’s not under arrest. He’s just a bystander. Said someone stole his wheelchair.”

  The other cop laughed. “Who the hell would want to sit in that?”

  When she made her way back to Zack, she overheard Hawley say, “It was probably just a jump-in gone bad.”

  “Are you guys talking about Farrukh?” Terri asked.

  Neither man spoke, each holding back a smile.

  “He was forty-six,” she said, guessing an age out of anger. “The guy worked.”

  Hawley looked over her shoulder then gave a thumbs up to the air. “Hey, he’s done. Let’s go down all casual like, so as not to disrupt the wildlife. Zack, you got a ventriloquist thingy?”

  “Yeah, I’m good.”

  The three of them set down the
steep grade of the small park, through the thin stand of trees to a large clearing filled with milling refugees and tangled, ankle-high wild grass. This was a small pocket of heavy gangland. Any one of them coming down here on their own would have been a dangerous act. Even Mutty’s solo deal with his catch was problematic, although he’d made clear to everyone that his partner was twenty seconds away, meaning the airborne cavalry—both real and mythical—was less than a minute after that.

  They found Mutty halfway down the dirt slope, surrounded by a small flock of steely-eyed middle-aged refugees, all men, muttering and shaking their heads in outrage. The attempted-murder kid stood with hands cuffed behind him, mumbling through tears, “I just wish I could go back and … I just wish I could do everything different. But I can’t. I can’t go back.”

  “Arrow of time, man.” Mutty said, not really listening, moving something invisible in the air before him.

  Zack texted,

  2 o’clock

  She yawned as she turned, seeing a balloon holding the byline for Ravi “Bottlecap” Rajagopalan over a young man standing thirty feet away, one of a half dozen. He didn’t have shades, which was a stroke of luck. Yawning once more even harder, she reached into her sign box, pulling up a dozen Affiliation boxes over everyone within Ravi’s immediate social circle. For good measure, she expanded Affiliations to label everyone in the park. Terri counted twenty allied SSK sets represented in their immediate vicinity. She turned for a moment, mesmerized by the sheer variety of stupid gang names.

  SSK stood for Sky Skraper Krip, a sweeping title appropriated by hundreds of divergent and sometimes-warring gang sets. The range of gang names, in this one division alone, still astonished her: Alpine Disaster SSKs, Knuckle Row Underworld, all the varied Rollin’ Figs sets. Then there were the sets named for their buildings; 633 South Fig Sky Kriplas, 505 South Flower playa SSKs, 445 W. 5Th Kop Killa Krips. For every one set whose name nearly rose to witty—Thugee Life Deth Squad, Viet King Kong SSKs—there were twenty with titles so brainless they defied belief. And it always seemed like the sets with the stupidest names were the deepest in membership.